


War Asset: Enterprise

by orphan_account



Category: Mass Effect, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Friendship/Love, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-01
Updated: 2013-06-01
Packaged: 2017-12-13 14:57:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/825607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A weak point in the universe has pulled the crew of the Enterprise away from their reality, and into the reality of Commander Shepard. After Nero, after Khan, they thought they could handle the Reapers. They were dead wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	War Asset: Enterprise

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The author may or may not adjust space-time physics in the course of writing this work, and hopes that readers would temporarily suspend their disbelief and just roll with it in the chapters to come. However, if readers notice a discrepancy way too wrong to ignore, they are welcome to submit a comment to point it out, and maybe I could get it sorted out. Thanks for reading this heads-up, enjoy the story. 
> 
> \----------

                “Hold it. Thrusters down. All hands standby.”

Captain James Tiberius Kirk of the USS Enterprise tucked his clapped hands under his chin and leaned forward on the swivel chair center of the Command Deck. “Mr. Sulu. What are we looking at here?”

                “Good eye. It’s a black hole, Captain.” Flight Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu called from his usual station left of the flight panel before the commanding officer.

Before him, at what could be considered the ‘front’ of the circular deck, a thick screen of transparent polymer served as wall, multi-specialized processor screen, and observation window to deep space all at once. Sulu tapped his controls, and an electronic indication box surrounded the tiny shape beyond the window. “Bordering on supermassive scale, by the look of it.”

                “Confirmed, Captain,” reported Lieutenant Uhura. “Readings indicate it doesn’t have enough gravitational force to affect us from this distance. Navigating should be safe, as long as we keep our distance.”

                Excited cries began to scatter the bridge.

“It’s the first sign of increased energy output our sensors have picked up in the system!”

                “Captain, there’s a chance of space debris of lower density flying in from behind us,” another officer interjected urgently.

                “Noted. Tell Chief Engineer Scott to keep engines on standby and alert the bridge the moment you spot something fast and dangerous coming our way. Kinbar, get ready with the phasers. Zap any debris the second I think it’s starting to invade Enterprise’s personal space. She’s a lady-ship, and needs her respect.”

                “Yessir.”

                Kirk leaned back and studied the entity thousands of kilometers away. Technically he wasn’t even ‘seeing’ the black hole, since light couldn’t bounce against it and be picked up by the eye. Rather, it was like looking at a blind spot in the universe, a missing chuck in the heavily star-freckled abyss of space.

Something bothered him about the sight. He reached out his arms, hands together, and pulled apart.

Nothing happened. Apparently Starfleet hadn’t taken the opportunity to add improvements while retrofitting since Khan’s destruction, much to Kirk’s disappointment.

“Someone blow that up, would you?”

                The black hole magnified before their eyes, still thousands of miles away, but now in much higher detail that they could even see its edges deforming the shapes of stars miles behind it.

                The corner of his mouth twitched. “Make a note, Lieutenant. That’s not supposed to be there.”

                “Sir?”

                “And while you’re at it, call Commander Spock up to the bridge. Mr. Chekov! Remind us again – what is a black hole?”

                “Vat?” The scrawny young man beside Sulu’s post jumped in his seat. “Uhm… Veel, Keptin, in simple terms it’s vhen a star dies in a supernowa – it collapses on itself. _Or_ it can be the aftereffect of a stellar collision. And because they are incredibly dense, they have ‘igh gravity and, according to de Law of Gravitation, can ‘suck in’ objects of less mass vithin a certain distance.”

                 “Couldn’t have said it better myself.” Kirk propped an elbow on an armrest and leaned on the base of his palm. His fond grin faded the longer he stared at the image onscreen. A number of crewmen passed him uncertain glances.

“You say it’s supermassive… How many stars are in this system, Mr. Gatritch?”

                “So far, we’ve marked the precise location of seventy eight stars, sir.”

                “Pull up the starchart, one-eighth size of the big screen at the lower right. Lieutenant Uruha, pull up the _oldest_ official Starfleet image file on record of the predicted layout of this system, same size, lower left.”

                The translucent charts filled their respective sides of the window, composed of swirling patterns in the practice of star charting since the earliest days of Starfleet. Kirk leapt from his chair and waved at the images like an exasperated teacher back at the Academy trying to teach his densest students something as simple as Rudimentary Astronomy. “See? _See?_ It doesn’t make sense.”

                Sulu spun his chair so that the Captain could read his subordinate’s facial expression. It wasn’t that of confusion, but rather polite impatience, reminding the man not everyone operated on the same wavelength he did. “They both look pretty much the same to me, sir.”

                “If I may, Captain.” First Officer Spock stepped out of the just-arrived elevator and onto the bridge, speaking in his usual unassuming manner. “Perhaps you should have Officer Gatritch mark the location of the black hole on his chart as well.”

                “Do it,” Kirk snapped. He looked at Spock earnestly. “But you see what I mean, don’t you?”

                Spock’s eyes had never left the screen since stepping out of the elevator. His lips tightened, more of a reflex of his mind quickly exploring the possibilities to explain this strange phenomenon, rather than a show of discomfort to demonstrate his disbelief. Emotions did not reveal themselves easily in this half-human, half-Vulcan Starfleet officer.

               Yet this straightforward, unbiased thinking made it a simple task for him to arrive at the same logical conclusion Kirk had.

               “Yes I do. And the implications are… troubling.”

                Kirk lit up. “Tell them why, Commander.”

               The Vulcan nodded, approached Kirk’s chair, and pressed a hidden notch on his armrest. A smaller holographic copy of the window materialized before the chair, and the Captain cried aloud. (“Oh, so they _did_ spiffy it up.”) Spock tapped the left star chart, highlighting the original image onscreen for everyone’s benefit.

               “This image was taken approximately two hundred Earth years ago. Compare to its more recent counterpart – notice that the stars charted thus far retain more or less the same position. Supermassive black holes have the tendency to gravitate other stars towards them. Since this hasn’t happened yet, it is likely this black hole only emerged extremely recently. Perhaps only hours prior our approach.

               “But it begs the question: how can this be possible? A stellar collision is unfeasible – sensors would have picked up such activity while we explored the system. As for the hypothesis of a star gone supernova, the old record did not have a stellar reading in the same location as the black hole in the other one, proving another impossibility. Ultimately, logic dictates that this black hole –”

               “ – isn’t supposed to exist,” Kirk finished. He went silent to let these dangerously physics-breaking implications settle within the rest of the crew. Then he grimaced and folded his arms. “I don’t like it.”


End file.
